


The Heat Was Hot and the Ground Was Dry

by justheretobreakthings



Series: Voltron Events [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Desert, Galaxy Garrison, Gen, Introspection, Keith (Voltron)-centric, Pre-Canon, songfic sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-01 14:55:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15145595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justheretobreakthings/pseuds/justheretobreakthings
Summary: I've been through the desert on a horse with no nameIt felt good to be out of the rainIn the desert you can remember your name'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no painA glimpse into Keith's year living in a shack in the desert.





	1. Horse With No Name

The shack wasn’t exactly much of a home. When Keith had first opened the door to shack, he had behind greeted by a flood of dank heat and humidity from the shack having sat idle for so long, baking in the desert heat, and the rattling air conditioning unit was taking its time getting it back to livable temperatures. The place has been dusty as well, and sandy. The windows and doorways were supposed to be pretty much air-tight to keep the dust and dirt out, but it seemed that a good bit had managed to seep in through whatever cracks it could find during the interim years since Keith had last been there. The place was almost bare of furnishings, and the few posters that functioned as personal touches on the drywall were so faded he could no longer tell from looking at them what they were originally supposed to depict.

To be fair, it wasn’t supposed to be a home. It was supposed to be a workshop-slash-storage area. His dad had cleared out a good portion of the shack to store shelves and boxes of books and papers and haphazardly stack monitors and equipment from that repurposed electronics store the next county over. For work, his dad had told him, for a project. Keith had no idea what the work had been, and hadn’t been particularly interested, not back when he was a kid.

The rest of the shack was used to pile high the sort of things that probably would have gone into a garage or shed if the house had had one and had started gathering dust from disuse even when Keith’s dad was still around. Hardware and tools, spare parts for the hoverbike, outdated electronics that his dad was sure he could still recycle into something useful someday; the shack was insulated well enough that they wouldn’t get warped beyond usability in the heat. And a stock of food, non-perishables in tightly sealed tins.

When he’d asked his dad what those were for, he’d simply replied, “Just in case.” Keith had left it at that. He idly wondered now if the “just in case” had included, “Just in case you get kicked out of school and have nowhere or no one to go to, and you’re feeling a little peckish.”

The house proper used to have some of these tins in the pantry as well, but those were long gone now. Them along with the house itself. Arson, the police had said. Culprit: person or persons unknown. It was a shitty answer, but it was the only one they would offer Keith.

The only furniture in the shack was a couch, the kind with a stiff metal frame and flat cushions that you would find in an office or a waiting room. It was far from an ideal bed, but Keith supposed it would have to do.

It wasn’t like he had anywhere else to go.

He was relieved when he flicked the light switch to the shack to see that the power was still working here. The little solar unit outside that was source of electricity for the shack had been practically obsolete even when his dad had first installed it, and Keith hadn’t been certain it would have held itself together all this time. He would have to test and see if he could use several of the outlets at once without it overcharging, but he was optimistic. In this desert sun, the panels had plenty to power them. Thank you, Arizona.

The first thing Keith did after starting up the air conditioning was decide he ought to get started on cleaning. The dust and sand had to go first. He located a push broom in one of the storage piles, right in the back corner, its handled propping up an old AM/FM radio that was balanced on a sagging cardboard box.

On a whim, he decided to grab the radio as well. Might as well; there wasn’t exactly much by way of entertainment here. He hadn’t really given much thought to how he was going to occupy his time out in the desert – he had been a lot more focused on just finding somewhere to go and hoping that the state would let him slip through the cracks again enough that they wouldn’t notice he still had months to go before he legally aged out of the foster system. He would much rather spend the rest of his life in a run-down one-room shack than another few months in one of those group homes.

The sound from the radio speakers crackled a bit, but otherwise came out fine. It took him some time exploring the dials to find a station to listen to, though. Most of the frequencies were just white noise. AM and FM radio stations weren’t nearly as common as they used to be, and probably would be gone entirely if enough radio enthusiasts weren’t still around to cling to them for the sake of nostalgia.

There were a couple of news and talk radio stations that he passed over immediately. He knew exactly what was going to be on them – the only thing that the local news had been talking about for days: the Kerberos mission. The Kerberos Tragedy, some of the media outlets were calling it. And Keith was sick of hearing about it.

The first music station he found was a country station, and Keith would rather have dug his eardrums out with a screwdriver than listened to  _that_.

He finally settled on a station that was halfway through playing “Smoke on the Water” when he turned to it. Classic rock, he figured, confirmed when the song faded out and “Edge of Seventeen” started up in its wake. Wasn’t his favorite genre, but he didn’t dislike it either. He could probably acquire a taste for it.

He let the station play as he swept and dusted, pausing to cough when he kicked out a particularly bad cloud of the dust or dirt. There was no dusting spray he could find, and no mop. Sometime he would have to make a trip out to town to pick up what supplies weren’t already in the shack, but it could wait.

Once he decided he had sufficiently cleared off the surfaces of the shack’s interior, he went outside to get a drink. He had to crank the slightly rusting pump several times before it started gurgling up water from the artesian well below the ground – he didn’t know if the shack was just too far away from town to use the reservoir or if it had just been more convenient not to have to worry about water bills, but as a kid he’d gotten by just fine solely on well-water. He took a drink from the spigot and then ducked his head under the water flow, sighing at the relief of the cool water after the heat of the shack.

He would have to figure out how to get that pump to work for him as a showerhead. There were some pipes in the shack’s storage, and he thought he could probably fathom up some way to fashion a make-shift shower stall if he partitioned off this area around the pump.

That would be a project for tomorrow, though. He shook the dripping water out of his hair and went back inside, ready to get a start on sorting through the piles of junk stored up here and figuring out what he could use and what should be cleared away.

The music was no longer playing when he entered, and instead the two deejays were engaging in some sort of between-song banter. Keith tuned it out as he went about his work.

Or, at least, he tried to, until one particular phrase caught his attention.

“ – petition going around to have statue made for the crew of the Kerberos mission,” one of the deejays was saying.

“A statue,” the other one said. “See, I like that. If I went to outer space and died, I’d want a statue. And I’d want them to build it out of those rocks they brought back from the moon when they sent Apollo up there.”

“You want a statue made of moon rocks,” the first one laughed.

“Well, why not? It ain’t like they’re doin’ anythin’ with them but lettin' them sit in storage or somethin'.”

“I’m pretty sure they’re using them for, like, science.”

“‘Like, science’, you’re so eloquent.”

“I’m a poet.”

“Sure you are. Listeners, if you call now we’ll send you a poetry anthology by Electric Eddie, only nineteen-ninety-nine.”

“All profits go toward building Bennie Jay a statue out of moon rocks.” The second deejay snorted.

Keith gritted his teeth, but he kept up with his work. They were local deejays, of course they were going to talk about Kerberos. At least they’d be getting back to playing music soon. And at least they weren’t badmouthing Shiro. Keith certainly wasn’t crazy about the fact that they were being so blasé about the event, but he would take that over listening to someone lament over the ‘pilot error’ that had supposedly brought the mission down.

“You know we’re legitimitely going to get someone to start lobbying to make the Kerberos statue out of moon rocks now, and it’ll be your fault,” the first deejay said.

“The Kerberos statue that probably isn’t even happenin’.”

“They won’t care, stuff like this brings the crazies out of the woodwork.”

“Ooh, speakin’ of, I don’t know how much you’ve been following social media the last few days – ”

“Little to none.”

“ – but the conspiracy theories have officially gotten into full swing,” the second deejay continued.

“Oh, well, naturally. So what’s the conspiracy, did the Garrison fake the Kerberos launch?”

“Oh, nah, nah, this time there’s a cover-up. We’ve got a good chunk of people sayin’ that the Garrison was lyin’ about what caused the mission to fail.”

“You don’t say.”

“So, dependin’ on who you ask, either they’re coverin’ up the fact that they built the ship wrong to try and protect their reputation, or they had planned for the mission to fail all along as some sort of tax scheme.”

“A  _tax scheme_.”

“Yeah.”

“What the hell kinda tax scheme would that even be?”

“I dunno, I didn’t come up with that. But hey, you gotta admit, if anyone were gonna figure out a way to do that and cover it up, it’d be the Galaxy Garrison.’

“Oh, yeah, you’re right on that mark. Do they have  _any_  research going on that’s not ‘top secret’?”

“Nope, all real hush-hush. They’re the big exclusive secret hideout in outer space.”

“Space CIA.”

“Space CIA, that’s it.”

“So tell me, Bennie, which theory do you subscribe to?”

“Neither, I’ve got my own theory.”

“And what’s that?”

“Just a sec.”

There was a rummaging sound, and after a moment the first deejay asked, “What are you doing?”

“Startin’ up the next song.”

“But you said you – ” He stopped as a piano riff started playing, and then burst out laughing. “Okay, you heard it here first, folks. The Kerberos mission failed due to  _alien abduction_.”

“You owe me ten bucks if I’m right,” the second deejay said.

“Will do. Here’s ‘Come Sail Away’. Enjoy.” He finished right as the singer started up, and the deejays went silent while the song played.

Keith sighed, releasing a tension he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in his shoulders. It seemed maybe he wasn’t the only one who wasn’t satisfied with the ‘pilot error’ explanation the Garrison had given. Sure, he was being marked ‘crazy conspiracy theorist’, but at least he wasn’t alone.

He half-listened to the music as he focused on rearranging the storage piles, catching just a couple of phrases of the lyrics.

_“I thought that they were angels, but to my surprise  
_ _They climbed aboard their starship and headed for the skies.”_

Keith had never understood prog rock.

He ended up working well into the night, the sun already set by the time he stood back from the piles of storage which he’d sorted meticulously by function and usefulness. There was more space now that the shack was organized, leaving the area feeling just a little less suffocatingly cramped. And he could take better stock of his inventory now; he figured he had at least a few weeks before he would have to find a way to buy more supplies.

He realized only once he had finished how worn out he was, and he flipped the light and flopped right down onto the couch. He didn’t bother with a blanket. The air conditioning was working, but it still wasn’t cool enough in the shack for him to want to sleep with bedcovers.

It wasn’t until he had settled onto the couch that he realized he had left the radio on, the upbeat rhythm of “Listen to the Music” bouncing off the walls, the only sound in the shack. For a moment he debated getting up to turn it off, but he ultimately decided against it. He was already in his sleeping position, and he wasn’t up to moving it. He opted instead to just fall asleep to the sounds of the radio.

“That was the Doobie Brothers, celebrating the anniversary of the release of their fifth studio album  _Stampede_  on this day in music history,” the deejay said – Electric Eddie, Keith was pretty sure this one was. “And we’re gonna keep the soft rock theme going for the next half hour. Here’s America with a transatlantic hit from their debut album – I think you know the one.”

A guitar started strumming, a little slower and softer than the previous song, and Keith closed his eyes and let the crooning voice of the singer act like something of a lullabye. The tune and lyrics went in and out of his head as he faded, but he knew this song, so he didn’t really need to pay attention to catch the words.

_“You see I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name_  
_It felt good to be out of the rain_  
_In the desert you can remember your name  
_ _‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain”_

He was asleep before the song ended.


	2. Welcome to the Jungle

The isolation started to get to him.

Keith had always been a loner. Not by choice, usually, more often by circumstance, but it was still something he had grown accustomed to. He could take care of himself, had in the past, and he could do without other people around. In fact, often at the Garrison he would crave solitude more than anything, and especially when things got particularly tense between him and another classmate – which they constantly did, and Keith could never figure out what he kept doing to set people off – he would have given anything to stay holed up in his room all day.

So he wouldn’t have thought that being out in the desert away from human contact would have bothered him all that much. But it seemed that, as much as he disliked crowds, the polar opposite wasn’t so great either.

Within a few days he made the decision to keep the radio on pretty much constantly. It was often just background noise as he went about his day, but there was something a little reassuring about hearing the chatter of the deejays. Like somewhere in the back of his mind he was certain he was the only living human left on earth, and hearing a live feed of other human voices cracking bad jokes and arguing over what was the best cover of “Me and Bobby McGee” – an argument which had ended with them playing the Janis Joplin cover and Bennie Jay declaring that anyone who thought it wasn’t the superior version was no longer allowed to listen to their station – was a little reminder that he wasn’t.

He got to know the style of the deejays’ banter, and have preferences for which ones were his favorite, since the station rotated between a few. And he got to know the songs.

Some of the songs were played frequently, at least every few days, and Keith wasn’t sure if it was because they were more popular or if the deejays just liked them more. In any case, he was starting to memorize a good handful of the songs on the station. A few of them, of course, he had already known from before constantly listening to the station, simply because they were those songs that made it into nearly everyone’s music libraries or were slapped onto ads and into movies.

A few, though, were more difficult than others to memorize, mainly due to the fact that he couldn’t catch the lyrics. A lot of songs had always given him that problem, and in the past, he would solve it by simply looking up the lyrics online. Now, though, without any sort of internet connection to speak of, he was stuck just having to concentrate hard and do his best.

That was another project to occupy his day, listening for lyrics. He had recently been able to discern the lyrics of “Welcome to the Jungle” well enough to discover to his shock that the song was not, in fact, about a literal jungle, and after half a dozen listens of an AC/DC track before he had finally noticed that the name of the song came from the line  _“dirty deeds and they’re done dirt cheap”_ instead of “ _dirty deeds and the thunder chief”_  – which, in retrospect, did make much more sense. He still couldn’t catch all the words he needed, though. There was still that one line of the chorus of “I Want You to Want Me” that he couldn’t make out a single word of, and he had decided to give up completely on ever figuring out what the hell the words to “Come Together” were supposed to be.

So he often just mumbled through parts of the songs when he sang along to them, which he had found himself doing more and more often completely by accident.

He wasn’t exactly much of a singer, usually ending up just a little bit flat and behind the beat, but it was the only time he actually found occasion to use his voice nowadays, so he did it anyway.

The music occupied his time, and that was a relief. He hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to what he was going to do with his free time once he was out here, and all of his time was now free time. There was little by way of entertainment in the shack. No television, definitely no video games. A crate of books had been stored in the shack, but they were all just either user manuals for various machines and computer programs, or non-fiction books on subjects Keith had no interest in. All of the ‘read for fun’ books would have been stored at the main house and turned to ash.

He promised himself he’d look for a used bookstore when next he took a trip to town – an errand that he kept putting off under the logic that he didn’t truly  _need_ to make the trip unless his food supply actually started running out.

The one thing he did manage to find was a set of charcoal pencils and a stack of sturdy paper. It had been a while since he’d really spent much time working on art; at the Garrison he’d been too busy with schoolwork to distract himself with hobbies. The supplies he dug up weren’t originally intended for art, instead there for his dad to make charts and blueprints and diagrams, but Keith thought this would be a better use.

Fortunately the desert gave him no end of subjects to look to for inspiration to draw. He had his pick of plant life and streams and landscapes and rock formations to pick from, and some of the wildlife he managed to spot would make for excellent pieces, although they didn’t hold still for very long. A particularly handsome desert hare had been making frequent trips past Keith’s fence, only to turn tail again and run off the moment Keith grabbed a pencil.

An animal sitting still was the gold mine. There was one instance when he’d found a desert recluse spider in his shack and had gotten a rather nice sketch finished up before he came to his senses enough to realize maybe it’d be a better idea to just kill it. The radio had coincidentally started playing “Another One Bites the Dust” as Keith smashed it with his boot, and he answered by flipping it off.

The other hobbie he’d taken up was exploring. It had started with him journeying further away from his shack in search of new subjects to draw, but he found that he liked simply being in new places as much as he liked drawing them. It made the desertscape seem less flat and infinite to know his way around it.

Occasionally he would make a whole day of it, load up some dried food and a couple of canteens and take off on his hoverbike, picking a direction he hadn’t gone yet and seeing where he’d end up. He tried not to focus too hard on the fact that he could bike for hours without finding another human soul around. That was okay, really. It was probably more efficient to explore by himself anyway. And of course there was that one day when the radio had played “Born to Be Wild” just as he was heading out, it had gotten stuck in his head, and he sang it to himself while attempting tricks on his hoverbike as he drove. He probably would have died of embarrassment if there had been any other human beings around to witness that.

These ventures out into the desert were also how he discovered exactly how he was meant to pass his time out in the desert.

He had been driving his bike out along the top of a line of cliffs – close enough to the edge to see where the canyon eventually dipped to the ground, far enough that he didn’t have to worry about falling – when he had spotted a line of animal tracks. They barely indented the ground, and were nearly covered in a thin layer of dirt, and Keith hadn’t seen where the tracks started, but they were there.

They were much too big to be coyote tracks, and not quite the right shape. A mountain lion, maybe? If it was a particularly large one, that is. Pumas weren’t unheard of in this part of Arizona, although he hadn’t seen any indication anywhere else of this big a cat being in this area.

He slowly moved his hoverbike along the cliff edge, trying to see where the animal might have gone. It was all dirt and rocks in this area, no vegetation in sight, and certainly no decent prey around that would interest a puma. But the tracks faded all too quickly, leaving no trail left to follow. So he turned his bike back to take another look at the tracks behind him, and wound up blinking, dumbfounded, at the ground.

The tracks were gone.

For a moment, he had to take a moment to question himself and his memory. He could swear on his life that they had been there, but he knew people tended to see things that weren’t there in the desert. Mirages. Still, weren’t those for seeing things in the distance? It wouldn’t count as a mirage if it was this close up.

But no, no, he knew they had been there, and he had seen where the tracks had been heading, even if they weren’t there any longer. And he didn’t know why, but he wanted to follow them. He  _needed_  to follow them. There was a magnetic pull in his gut telling him that, for some reason, he desperately wanted to see where the possibly-imaginary tracks led.

His gut had led him astray before, but he still trusted it more than his head.

Thinking back to where he’d thought he saw the tracks before, he looked for a way down the side of the cliff. There were rocky outcroppings along the cliff’s wall, lined with stubby spurts of grass and dry bushes, too narrow to drive his hoverbike on them, but wide enough that he could comfortably walk on them if he was careful about his balance.

So that’s what he did. Just another bit of exploring, but one that was now led by this pull that Keith couldn’t for the life of him explain.

He hadn’t made it far down the cliff, though, when a section of the outcropping he was walking along turned out to not be as sturdy as it looked, and rocks crumbled beneath his foot as he set it down. He lurched down along with the rubble, thrown too off-balance to keep a hold of the cliffside, and he went skidding down with them.

He hastily tried to get a footing, grab back onto the cliff’s edge, but he still ended up sliding down a couple dozen feet before he managed to take hold of a plant growing out of the cliff wall and maneuver himself over to another outcropping. He panted for breath as he scrabbled to get securely back onto the ledge, and he managed to hoist himself up enough to dig his fingers into the dirt and the dry grass upon it and hold on tight enough to climb up and roll onto the solid rock.

And he had just finished swinging his leg up onto the ledge and was about ready to collapse into place when a sound made him freeze where he was.

He held completely still, only moving his eyes to gaze up at the reptilian creature that apparently was sharing the ledge with him. He was nearly at eye level with it, and it appeared to be staring at Keith as well, speckled and cat-like eyes boring into his own violet ones. It was curled in on itself, coiled, and even as Keith stared, the rattle at the tip of its tail lifted and shook.

The rattle. The deadly threat that everyone who lived anywhere near the desert knew to avoid, and he definitely should not be this close to it.

Every inch of his body wanted to bolt, but he couldn’t, not without setting the snake off. This was bad, but he could still get out of here. He just had to not startle it, not make any sudden moves.

He scarcely breathed and tried not to so much as blink as slowly, slowly, he moved his arm so he could set his palm onto the ground and, just as slowly, start levering himself up. The rattler watched him steadily, flicking out an inky black tongue at one point and rattling again, but not yet moving any more than Keith was.

Keith managed to get his whole torso off the ground, before he brought his other hand in to finish pushing himself up, and the crack of a sturdy twig he hadn’t previously noticed under his other hand seemed as loud as gunfire.

The rattler struck.

And just as quickly, before he had time even to think, Keith struck too, snatching his dagger from where it was hooked to his waistband and lunging at the rattler faster than he’d ever thought he was even capable of moving and plunging it through the snake’s body, pinning it to the ground.

He was panting, shaking, as he let go of the hilt of his dagger to survey the damage. The snake’s jaw was still stretched wide open, unhinged in its attempted attack, fangs bared, and Keith had seen how close it had come. If that thing had been even just a fraction of an inch closer to him, those fangs would be in his arm right now.

A few moments more passed as Keith gathered his composure before he reached out and retrieved his knife, having to scrape the remains of the rattler off the blade with one hand as he picked it up off the ground, and even though it was longer a threat, he kept his eyes fixed on it as he stood and backed away from it.

It was like a reminder to him, a warning sign:

“Don’t get too comfortable.”

For a while, he had almost found himself forgetting why no one else ever moved out to build a home or live out here. He remembered now.

His trek back up the cliff wall was much longer than the trip down, but eventually he managed to make his way to top and clamber back onto his hoverbike. He was coming back here, he had decided. Because he still felt that strange tug in his gut. But he would do that later. Come back better prepared and packed to venture further. For now, he needed to get back to the shack and wash the rattler blood off his knife.

He kept the blade under the spigot outside, scrubbing it thoroughly with a cloth, until he was sure that it was clean and polished like it was new – his knife, he’d noticed in the past, didn’t seem to tarnish easily. He didn’t know why, but it was a gift horse, so he had never really thought to try to figure it out either.

The radio was playing Guns N’ Roses again when he entered the shack to put the knife back in its sheath and store his empty canteens.

 _“You know where you are?”_  the singer was wailing as Keith went about dropping his things off and turning to head back outside.  _“You’re in the jungle, baby. You’re gonna die.”_

On his way out to shower off the day he bumped into the wooden crate that the radio was situated on top of, knocking it to the ground. It was only partly accidental.


	3. Here I Go Again

As much as Keith had enjoyed taking his hoverbike out to explore the desert, he hadn’t thought of actually mapping it out or taking notes on what was out there. He had taken a cartography class at the Garrison – a prerequisite if he hoped in the future to ever end up on a mission to an unexplored planet, and that had sounded like an appealing prospect up until the Garrison’s most recent exploration mission – but it wasn’t something that really interested him, just a class he took because he had to.

But the prospect occured to him when he had gone back to that cliffside, packed for survey rather than leisure, leaving his art supplies behind in favor of a length of abseiling rope looped over his shoulder and gaiters over his boots, and he had started looking for where those animal tracks – which he was still so certain he had seen – had led.

He’d made it to the bottom of the gorge, letting his instinct take over when it came to deciding where to search for the elusive animal, but hadn’t had much luck. He was  _so sure_ , though. So sure there was something out there that he was supposed to be finding. And using his gut as a divination rod wasn’t really an exact science.

The desert was vast. He’d have a lot of ground to cover. He would need to keep track of where he’d been and what he’d found.

At long last he relented and decided to make that big trip out to town that he needed. He woke early on the next Monday – and he knew the day of the week only because the early morning deejay had wished everyone a happy start to their work week, and hoping all the listeners out there had had the sense to do any partying or drinking on Friday or Saturday night, unlike himself, and thrown “Authority Song” on the air with a request that everyone just enjoy the music and no one call into the station for the next few hours, please – so he could beat the sun for at least part of the long drive to town.

He had cash, at least enough to get by. Shiro had insisted on him finding odd jobs to keep him productive in the summer, so he still had a bit of money left over from lawn-mowing. Most of it, though, was from the Garrison. His scholarship had included a stipend to pay for uniforms, school supplies, and meals. But the stipend was placed in his student debit account, which he was allowed to withdraw from. As long as he selected the minimum meal plan and Shiro’s programmer friend got him a couple of leaked textbook pdf’s to save him on supplies, he had money left from the stipend to squirrel away for a rainy day.

The Garrison probably hadn’t been aware that he was misusing his stipend, but it was too late for them to do anything about that now.

He stopped by a bulk food store first to replenish his supply of groceries – well, the non-perishables and dried goods any greengrocer would be horrified hearing referred to as “groceries” – and then traveled around to a handful of different hardware stores and electronic stores to find rolls of graphing paper, rulers and protractors and compasses, a GPS receiver that didn’t have any useless wi-fi-connected accessories to jack its price up, and camera that was sturdy enough to survive if he were to drop it out in the desert and that developed its photos polaroid-style so he could print them quick. One stop at a used bookstore later to gather any almanacs and atlases and maps that may come in handy, and he was strapping his haul to his bike with cables and nylon straps and then heading back out.

Once back at the shack, he got to work on setting up for his new project. Initially he tried to spread everything he needed onto the little desk in the shack, but he didn’t have nearly enough room. So, it was round two of rearranging the room.

He kept it up throughout the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, just him and his shack and his radio. The station had a good selection for him today, moving through a collections of songs that were loud and energetic and boisterous. “Hot Blooded” and “Livin’ On A Prayer” and “Eye Of The Tiger” and their ilk. The sorts of songs people would often pump through their earphones or stereo systems while working out to keep them energized. Probably wasn’t great for variety or playlist flow, but it kept Keith moving, so it did its job.

A lot of the stockpiled old electronics and small machinery were moved out of the shack and out behind the house. Keith wasn’t crazy about leaving so much stuff out where it was constantly exposed to the sun and heat and dust of the desert, but it wasn’t as if he really had any use for any of it, and it probably would have only ended up as scrap metal anyway.

And more importantly, it left more space in the shack, enough to clear away nearly an entire wall of the room. The plaster of the wall was malleable enough for him to tack papers up onto it, so he used it as something of a giant bulletin board. Across the center he hung up a map he’d purchase, a topographical map that showed the desert for miles and miles around on all sides, although that didn’t have much fine detail to hone in on. A couple of the maps in one of the atlases he’d picked up could function as insets and close ups of areas on it, so he ripped out those pages and hung them up and dragged strings along them to indicate where on the big map these smaller insets would fit.

He took the evening to relax and settle after getting his wall set up, eventually drifting asleep to the strains of “Ramblin’ Man” and ready to head out again in the morning to see what this new approach to exploration could accomplish for him.

Over the next few days that turned into the next few weeks, the wall began filling up. Keith was following the trail of his gut feelings, biking into any area of the desert that his instincts tugged him toward in the slightest. Slowly the wall was becoming plastered in his own carefully hand-drawn maps of every part of the desert he had visited, and photographs of landmarks to remember and well-hidden caves and crevices that he’d spotted. He always found himself drawn into those, although none of them yielded anything. None of his exploring was yielding much at all except markings on his map on where he thought he was feeling that little tug of energy the strongest and or had crossed out areas that seemed useless.

That is, it didn’t yield much until he came across the drawings.

He had gone out pretty deep into the desert, over an hour by hoverbike, continuing on a several-days-long quest to head out in this general direction and see what he could find. And when he had gotten off his bike to go on foot to navigate his way around an outcropping of boulders, he had found a cave entrance buried among them. Pulling his flashlight out, he’d entered.

And finally, finally, after all this time, he found something. He had stared up in awe at the markings etched into the cave wall.

Pictures, images of creatures, some that looked like ones that had been inserted into a fantasy film, some that didn’t resemble anything he could remember ever having seen before, and some that looked familiar, normal. Like the lion-like creature that had images scattered of it across the walls and onto the roof of the cave.

It wasn’t just the fact that it was an animal he knew that made it seem familiar, though. There was something else there, some little spark of recognition. Like he could swear he had seen this particular creature before somewhere else, or maybe this particular drawing, but for the life of him he couldn’t think of where or when.

There were other etchings too. Some that seemed to be patterns of some sort of abstract art, some lines of symbols that looked like they could be a language of some kind, although one that Keith had never seen before.

Whatever they were, though, they sure as hell weren’t made by nature. Someone, or something, had carved out these images. Someone or something had been in these caves. Someone or something was out here in the desert with him.

He wasn’t alone out here, and he didn’t know if the revelation scared or excited him, or both.

He got to work. He tried to get photographs of the etchings, but the lack of light made it difficult, so he pulled out paper to sketch them out instead, trying to get every detail down. The place was coated in these etchings, and he had to keep switching between his right and left hands as he drew so they wouldn’t cramp up.

He needed to explore this further. The cave went deep, surely there was more to look for, but he needed more than just the little flashlight, and he was stocked for hiking, not spelunking. He would need to restock. Get some better lights, some bolts for his abseiling equipment, some wellington boots for the cave floor.

After packing up his camera and drawings, he clambered out of the cave and back onto his hoverbike to head back to the shack. He hung his sketches onto the wall, as well as the mapping he’d done so he could easily find the place again.

Now he just had to regroup. Get a good night’s sleep, head to town in the morning to stock up, go back when he was ready.

He killed the lights and lay down onto the couch, but he couldn’t sleep. This was too much, it was too big. He was positive that whatever was in those caves, whatever those drawings meant, they were an important part of that energy he had been feeling, that pull.

They were the first indication that he wasn’t just getting a little loopy from the desert sun and taking off on a goose chase – not even a goose chase, since he hadn’t even known what it was he was trying to find. He had a better idea now.

Still, he tried to rest, shutting his eyes and half-listening to the songs coming out of the radio, not feeling any less awake than he had before.

He’d laid there for nearly two hours without getting any actual sleep when the deejay introduced a Whitesnake single that dug into Keith’s head.

 _“Tho’ I keep searching for an answer_  
I never seem to find what I’m looking for  
Oh Lord, I pray you give me strength to carry on  
‘Cause I know what it means to walk along the lonely street of dreams”

Screw it.

He stood abruptly from the couch. There was no point in trying to rest up. A couple of the stores in town were open 24-7; he probably didn’t actually need to wait until closer to morning to head out and ready his inventory. Besides, he was reeling, shaky, wanted to get this done  _now_  and not wait a moment longer.

He had a goal now, a question to answer. And damn it if he wasn’t going to throw himself into it like his life depended on it.

In an instant he was outside, revving up his bike, catching the echo of the shack’s radio but moving out of range of hearing just as the song finished up its chorus.

 _“An’ I’ve made up my mind_  
I ain’t wastin’ no more time  
Here I go again”


	4. Ridin' the Storm Out

“You’re listening to Ninety-eight-point-nine K-R-R-C, and that was Blue Öyster Cult’s ‘Burnin’ For You’, played now to honor the fact that it’s a real scorcher out there today, folks. Seems the heat wave and the dry spell both are making no plans to leave quite yet, so watch yourself out there, and to those of you who are listening to us on your commute, be careful not to touch that metal part of your seatbelt.”

Keith pealed his eyes open, blinking slowly in the sunlight streaming into the shack. He had overslept. Usually the early morning deejay was still on air when he woke up, but it was already late enough this morning for the usual duo to have taken their spots, and apparently they were already well into their first music block.

He groaned as he sat up, scrubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. It was probably his own fault for having gotten so little sleep in the past few days. But he’d been busy. The energy that had been dragging him out into the desert had recently been tugging him to farther and farther reaches. It got to the point where it made more sense to bring a bedroll along and spend the nights under the stars or in caves than to drive to and from the shack.

The last few days, however, he’d had trouble getting to sleep in the particularly intense heat over the dry ground, and his attempts to sleep in the etching-covered grottos had been encumbered by strange dreams. Well, not dreams, exactly, but some strange interference in his thoughts as he slept, like he was picking up some sort of radio signal in his head that he couldn’t tune into focus.

This wouldn’t have stopped him from staying out in the desert and continuing his search, though. It was the weather that did that. He finally had to make a return trip to the shack when the signs of dust storms kicking up in the distance demanded that he go somewhere sturdy to wait the storm out.

Keith got up and grabbed a tin of dried apricots from his stash, to eat as his ‘breakfast’, and listened to the deejays’ voices, letting their volume slowly wake him up.

“Gotta say, I don’t really mind the heat,” Bennie was saying. “If it were humidity we were dealin’ with, it’d be a different story, but a dry heat, it could be a hundred and fifty degrees out there and I’d still consider it a good day for a picnic. It’s the beauty of livin’ in Arizona, man.”

“Well, buddy, while you’re out there burning your skin off, the rest of us will probably be staying out of the sun like sane people. Dust storms on the horizon today, listeners, and apparently there’s a storm front planning to crash into our friendly neighborhood heat wave, so we’ve got an alert out now warning to take cover for a haboob later today.”

“A haboob. There’s a  _haboob_  comin’,” Bennie said, drawing out the last syllable.

“And in other news, listeners, my beloved co-host is, in fact, eight years old.”

“Okay, you know what, ain’t my fault. If they wanted people to take the friggin’ massive dust storms seriously, they should have given them a less stupid name than ‘haboob’.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“I dunno, whoever’s in charge of words. That Merriam Webster person.”

“Merriam and Webster are two different people.”

“Whatever.”

“And they’re both long dead.”

“So the throne is up for grabs, then.”

“All right, so you wanna take over the job?”

“Yeah, and the first thing I’d do is pick out a more serious-sounding name for haboobs.”

“And what would that name be?”

“Habreasts.”

Eddie let out a sound somewhere between a gurgle and a cough, like he was choking on something, and then dissolved into a peal of laughter. “Oh my  _God_.”

“You laugh because you’re jealous you didn’t think of it first.”

“No, man, I laugh because if I don’t, I’ll cry. Well, listeners, while we wait for the dust to get up and rolling, we’re going to cool off from the heat with some Foreigner.”

The first notes of “Cold As Ice” started playing, and Keith finished up his apricots, toweled his hands off onto his jeans, and decided to get to work. He was stuck here at the shack for the day until the dust cleared enough to head out again, so the least he could do was ensure that the shack and his possessions were prepared for it.

He went outside and – after being smacked with a wall of heat that he was pretty sure was the highest in temperature he had felt in the desert yet – kicked his bike into neutral to get it into place. The clouds that indicated the storm front were in the east, so Keith tucked the bike against the wall of the shack beside the shower partition, the leeward side of the shack. Once he killed the engine, he set its tarp over it, pinning it to the ground with sturdy spikes. That ought to hold up for the haboob. It would certainly have been more ideal to have it indoors somehow, but it wasn’t like the shack had a garage, nor would the hoverbike be able to fit through the door, so this was the best he could do for now.

Next was the matter of ensuring that the shack itself was reinforced. The shack was sturdy, sure, and well insulated, but that didn’t mean it was ready for anything. The place had been beginning the process of falling into disrepair for a while now, evidenced boldly by the cracks that stretched across the entirety of the shack’s east wall. Keith had felt he’d done a good job of maintaining the shack, always quick to patch up the roof and siding if either seemed ready to break anywhere and keeping the interior clean and sand-free, but it still didn’t hurt to be on the safe side.

His project for the next couple of hours, then, was getting haboob-ready. Checking thoroughly for any leaks or cracks anywhere, sculpting the edges of his door and windows with butyl rubber, and finally, when the dust cloud was near enough, locking himself tight into the shack and sitting up against the wall to wait it out.

The radio was his source of entertainment and time-passing. The dust outside seemed to be interfering with the FM waves’ ability to reach his radio, since the audio kept crackling and occasionally fading out and back in, but the signal was never lost entirely, so he kept listening, and cranking up the volume dial as the storm raged continually louder outside.

He was nearly two hours into the haboob when a crash sounded. Jimi Hendrix’s voice on the outro of “In From The Storm” was just fading out when the sudden and sharp sound of glass shattering had Keith standing bolt upright, darting his gaze to the window.

It was all well and good to ensure that the sill and edges around the window were sealed up, but that still didn’t make the glass of the panes any stronger against debris that the winds picked up and sent his way, as the rock that had just flown through proved.

Keith hissed a string of curses out under his breath as the volume of the storm increased tenfold. The music from the radio only avoided being drowned out entirely because he had already turned the volume up so high. The cracks spiderwebbing along the window grew and sagged under the weight of dust and dirt pounding against it, a stream of it making its way inside through the hole already there. His instinct was screaming at him to get that window patched up, and  _now_ , but his common sense managed to overrule that, since shards were still being pulled off the pain and clattering into the shack, and a faceful of broken glass was not something he wanted to deal with if he could avoid it.

He slammed his eyes shut and coughed when some of the dust flew into his face, and he realized he really needed to hunker down now that the shack wasn’t as functional a shelter as it had been. First order of business was to dive across the room to the cardboard box where he kept his clothes, yanking out a cranberry-red kerchief that he tied over his nose and mouth to keep himself from breathing in the dust as best he could. Then, as he hastened his way back to corner of the shack where he’d tucked himself next to the couch, he pulled the slab of plywood that he’d used as a table off of the cement blocks that were holding it up to position in front of him, a shield between himself and the rest of the room.

“Looks like the storm should be winding down within the next half hour,” the deejay’s voice was saying as he ducked down. “In the meantime, the state weather service has some fantastic feeds up for those storm entusiasts out there who want to see the dust in all its glory without having to go jumping into it themselves. Fair enough – stick to your basements and interior rooms for the time being, listeners. You’d have to be out of your mind not to, in this weather.”

“Fuck off, Electric Eddie,” Keith growled.

“Gonna be sticking with our theme right now as best we can, so enjoy this number from Kansas’s Point of No Return.”

The guitar started to strum the opening of “Dust In The Wind”, and Keith would have rolled his eyes if they weren’t tightly closed. As it was, he just sat and waited, trying to concentrate on the songs from the radio rather than the tempest around him.

It felt like half of an eternity before at long, long last, the wind and dust finally quieted. Keith moved his plywood shield aside slowly, blinking warily into the room and not liking what he saw. The whole place was coated in dust and dirt. A layer was spread unevenly throughout the floor, and everything in the room was desaturated into shades of brown and gray from the dust that now covered it.

He looked up at the wall, the one where he had his maps and sketches and photographs and charts tacked up, and cursed. The wall wasn’t ruined, but his collection had still taken a hit. Besides everything being painted with dust like the rest of the shack – something that was bound to mess up some of the charcoal drawings – an alarming number of the papers and pictures had been scratched or torn by the dust and debris. A couple of them had been ripped right out from where the thumbtacks pinned them to the wall and fallen to the floor, where the dirt had manged to give them a beating.

Shit. That was a lot of work he was going to have to replace. And even that would have to wait until after he made the shack’s interior livable again.

Actually, he probably should get himself cleaned up too. He was, after all, covered in just as much dust as the rest of the shack. He stood up and made his way out of the room, grimacing at the little crunches of broken glass under his feet as he walked. He wouldn’t take a full shower now, just get the dust off of his hands and face and out of his hair for the time being.

When he stepped outside, though, his thoughts of getting cleaned up were pushed right out of his mind as he spotted his hoverbike. That bike that was supposed to have been kept safe under the tarp, but the tarp had apparently not held up against the haboob, and had at some point flown away. The bike, now, was a mess. Coated in dirt just like everything else, and visibly dented in place Keith could spot as he approached, no doubt from being pelted by debris. One of the headlights had been smashed completely. And there was sand, dirt, everywhere. Anywhere a single grain could fit in, it had. In the exhaust, wedged against the footpeg, and into the internal systems as well, as a check of the engine and airbox showed.

He let out a roar of frustration and kicked the wall of the shack. This was going to take forever to fix. And until he finished the job, he was out of transportation. The hoverbike was his way into the desert, out to town, basically anywhere away from this shack. There was nothing around for miles, certainly nothing he could reach on foot. He was stuck here.

With a sigh, he turned and made his way back inside the shack. Nothing to do now but get to work, he thought as he grabbed a broom and dustpan to start on the long job of clearing out the dirt and glass on the floor.

The radio was still going strong as ever, not about to let the dust covering it deter it. And Keith was grateful to have it. It was too quiet now after the dust storm, too great a difference from the noise from before. An absolute silence right now probably would have just felt eerie. As it were, he let the sounds of REO Speedwagon accompany him as he got to work.

 _“The wind outside is frightening_  
_But it’s kinder than the lightning life in the city_  
_It’s a hard life to live but it gives back what you give”_

He half-mumbled along to the words as he swept, trying to keep his frustrations in check, gathering the shards and fibers of glass into a pile and shoving the dirt out the open doorway.

It occurred to him about ten minutes in that maybe this was for the best, that he had this project to focus on for a while. That maybe it was the universe’s way of telling him to take a break from his long treks into the desert, to stay at home for a while.

If that was the case, though, then the universe was an unsubtle dickwad.


	5. Lonely Is the Night

Keith had been growing complacent, he realized after a while.

The discovery of the etchings on the cave walls had been a breakthrough, the biggest that he’d had since coming out here to the desert and following the lure of that strange energy. And for at least the first couple of months, he’d been singlemindedly obsessed with the images, photographing and sketching every one he could find, delving deeper into caves and searching tirelessly for other crevices that led him to more collections of similar markings. The days he spent fixing his hoverbike, the ones when he was stuck at the shack, were agony on his desperate anticipation to get back out there and keep looking.

But he had eventually been stymied, reaching the point where he was certain that he’d found all the etchings that there were to find, and still being no closer to figuring out the meaning behind them than he had been when he’d first discovered them.

That certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. After combing through every book and reference guide he had in the shack in search of any mention of anything that might be useful, he had expanded his search, using his next trip to town to dig through bookstores and even stop in at the library both to search their shelves and to use their computers to look on the internet for any information he could find. And he’d kept the search up for hours, trying his best to ignore the way other library patrons kept casting curious stares over toward the disheveled, sunburnt, dust-coated young man fervently looking up pictures of cave drawings.

The lack of any further breakthroughs took their toll on Keith’s motivation, and gradually he found himself spending less time out exploring or looking through the caves and more time at the shack, staring at the wall coated in maps and charts and photographs and half-listening to the radio, sometimes for hours on end.

He was falling asleep earlier, and still rising with the sun, leaving a net gain of total hours he would sleep. He had tried to get his body clock to shift a bit, go back to his usual time of falling asleep and then waking up later, but to no avail.

One downside to waking up as early as Keith often did was that the early morning deejay, Skeeter Mulligan, would still be on air. Although Bennie Jay and Electric Eddie hosted throughout the majority of the day, and become voices Keith knew better than any other in world, they couldn’t stay on air twenty-four-seven, so a couple of other deejays cycled through. CC Bowers took late night, and Keith didn’t mind her; she didn’t talk much between songs, which meant he missed out on commentary, but also got more songs in the same amount of time, so it was an okay trade. Skeeter, on the other hand, would talk the audience’s ears off about the history of every song he played, none of which Keith was interested in. He didn’t have any desire to have to sit through lectures between the songs.

This morning, he woke to Skeeter’s droning voice as usual. “This is one of those singles that many are not aware are a cover version, as it greatly surpassed the original in popularity and longevity,” he was saying. “But in fact, the single first appeared on its writer Harry Nilsson’s album ‘Aerial Ballet’ a year before Three Dog Night released their version on their self-titled album in 1969. The way the tune came about is actually a rather interesting anecdote. The opening notes for the song were inspired by the busy signal on the telephone, which – ”

“For fuck’s sake man,” Keith groaned as he rolled over on the couch in an attempt to start waking up, “Get on with the stupid song already.”

That was a habit he’d developed fairly recently, in just the past few weeks: talking to the radio deejays. He didn’t know why he’d started doing it. He had never been the sort to engage in other similar behaviors like shouting at referees on TV screens or whispering warnings to characters in horror films. But he started up all the same.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that this was the closest he could get to conversation out here, the closest he came to meaningful human interaction.

He tried not to let that thought depress him.

The deejay finally finished blabbing and played the next song, and the opening notes of Three Dog Nights’ “One” blared out of the radio.  _“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do…”_

Keith groaned again and sat up. All that waiting out Skeeter’s boring history lesson, and it was for a song he really didn’t even like.

He let it draw him out of bed, though, and got up to eat his breakfast. He settled onto the couch again afterward, a sketchpad balanced on his knee. As of late he’d been getting back into drawing for fun instead of for recording cave drawings, and he did his best to ignore that annoying tugging in his gut that seemed to be asking him why he was wasting his time on this instead of getting back out there searching.

He whiled the time away drawing throughout the morning, as the deejays switched out and Eddie and Bennie started their morning block. Occasionally he would hum along as he drew.

 _“Are you reelin’ in the years_  
_Stowin’ away the time_  
_Are you gatherin’ up the tears_  
_Have you – ”_

The song cut off abruptly with a small pop, and Keith looked up, startled by the sudden silence. The quiet did, however, let him hear the little scratching sound coming from the floor, and he looked down to see a brown-gray tuft of fur, a desert pocket mouse, nibbling on the cord plugging the radio into the wall outlet.

“No, no, no, shoo! Shoo!” Keith cried, rushing at toward the radio. The mouse scurried into a corner as Keith snatched up the electrical cord and held it up to examine. It had been torn cleanly through by the mouse’s teeth, the frayed edges of copper fibers poking out through a hole in the cord’s rubber insolation. Electrical tape would seal up the rubber, but not get the metal back into place.

He sighed and looked back over at the radio, which was silent for the first time in longer than he could remember. He would have to get it fixed. Keith was pretty good with electronics and machinery that weren’t digital – he needed to see the components he was working with and how they connected, and streams of ones and zeroes didn’t cut it – but it would have to wait until he could pick up a cord to replace this one. And he’d just made a supply run two nights ago.

He bit at his lower lip as his eyes moved from the cord to the radio’s speakers. He could go a couple of weeks without the radio, he supposed. Sure, he’d gotten pretty accustomed to having it around as background noise, but he also liked the quiet. Now maybe he could appreciate that quiet more than he had been, at least for a little while.

So he set the radio aside, wrapping the electrical cord up around it to ensure it would stay out of the way. He went in search of the mouse, so he could catch it and drop it off outside before it could damage anything else in the shack.

For the first two days without the radio, he was perfectly fine. It was peaceful, the silence, gave him a chance to get lost in his own thoughts without interruption or distraction. If he did need music, he knew enough of the songs by heart by this point that he could just sing them to himself. His voice was mediocre at best, but it was something. And although it took a bit longer than normal to fall asleep without the music, he slept soundly through the night.

On day three, however, the quiet started to get to him.

He had never noticed before how suffocating the quiet could get. Like he was being buried in the silence. The radio had been like a little breeze in the heavy air of silence in the shack. And the desperate focus he had on the cave drawings was starting to return, driving him out to the caves again during nearly all his waking hours, although that may have been less a desire to resume his hunt for answers and more a need to get out of the oppressive quiet of the shack.

And for all that he thought it would be nice to have some time alone with his thoughts for a while, that wasn’t turning out so great either. There wasn’t much to do out in the desert, so if all he had to pass the time was think, it gave his mind the go-ahead to go wild. Things he had tried to avoid thinking about if he could, Shiro and the Kerberos mission topping the list, were making their way back to the forefront of his mind. The images from the caves would pound against his skull demanding his attention. And he was feeling increasingly aware of just where he was in life, alone in a shack in this god-awful silence when less than a year ago he had been on track to follow his surrogate brother’s footsteps in becoming one of the best pilots the Galaxy Garrison ever produced.

He realized now why being alone with his thoughts in the peace and quiet wasn’t as pleasant as it should be: his thoughts sucked.

He got a respite from his loud and racing thoughts when he slept, but that was becoming more difficult as well. The radio, even with the volume turned low so he could sleep through it, had done a good job of drowning out the other night noises of the desert. He hadn’t really noticed before how much the air conditioning unit rattled, or how obnxious the sporadic croaking of frogs could get, or how loud the occasional coyote howls were.

He powered through them, though, keeping an eye on his food supply to determine when he’d finally need to take another trip into town.

But a week into the silence, he’d had enough. He had been lying stiffly awake on the couch for hours now, and was well into the dead of night, being pummeled from all sides from his thoughts and the tiny night sounds that sounded so much louder now, when he sprang up, deciding in that very moment that he couldn’t handle another minute of this. He hurried outside and onto his hoverbike, and without another thought set out on the hour-long drive to town.

The town was nigh deserted at this hour of the night. Keith didn’t pass by a single other driver or pedestrian as he maneuvred his hoverbike through the streets, and the place was lit only by scattered streetlamps, nearly every store window having gone dark for the night.

He pulled up alongside the sidewalk in front of one of the few stores that had its lights up, his preferred hardware shop, the one that had the biggest and most varied selection of tools and materials. The electronic bell dinged as he entered, and the clerk at the counter nodded to him. The only people there were clerk, himself, and one other man in an aisle examining a display of Allen wrench kits – whether he’d had a late night hardware emergency like Keith or was just an insomniac with a metal shop hobby, he neither knew nor cared.

Keith knew his way around the store well by now, so he was able to make a beeline straight to what he needed, select the cord that matched the ruined one, and slap it down onto the counter to buy. The clerk made no comment about Keith’s brusque manner or the strangeness of the hour, just rang him up, passed him the cord, and let him get on his way.

That was the second reason why this was the hardware store Keith always came to when he needed supplies: they seemed to have no interest whatsoever in what anyone who came into the store was making their purchases for. So if Keith were to walk into the store to buy, say, a bag of low-density ammonium nitrates prills – which he used for tunneling into caves, exploding the anfo at a safe distance – no one would even raise an eyebrow. On the one hand, it was a bit worrying that the store was so cool with such purchases by people they knew nothing about, and he was sure the legality was questionable, but it made things convenient for Keith, so he wasn’t complaining.

He didn’t bother picking anything else up in town, nothing to replenish his stocks of food or soap or paper or any other supplies that he used up on the regular. That would have just taken more time, and he didn’t want to delay himself for a minute longer than he had to.

It was still pitch dark when he finished the trip back to the shack. A two-hour round trip for just one single electrical cord. At any other point in his life he would have been flabbergasted at what a waste it was, but right now, it felt more than justified.

He flicked on the light and moved the radio onto the table before grabbing his toolkit to start disassembling. With slightly shaky hands he pried it open to reveal its internal mechanisms, locating the spot where the cord was secured into place and setting to work removing the terminal screws to affix the new cord in its place.

Once the replacement was finished and the radio reassembled, he set it back onto the crate where it typically stood and plugged the new cord into the outlet. He held his breath in anticipation as he switched it on.

And Bob Seger’s low voice came out of the speakers, halfway through the first verse of “Turn the Page”.

Keith’s whole body sagged as he heaved out an enormous sigh of relief. He had the music back. He nearly wanted to cry, it felt so good to finally have another human voice in the shack again. He could not care less about the fact that said voice was just a recording from the nineteen-seventies, or that it wasn’t talking to him. It was all the company he had, and it was back.

He collapsed onto the couch to listen to the singer’s voice, and he just focused all his attention on the songs. He could push his own thoughts out of his way now, let the radio take over the space, and god did it make things so much easier.

There wasn’t much night left before the sun rose again, but Keith was going to make the most of the time he had. He rolled over and shut his eyes as Bob Seger faded out and Billy Squier took his place without missing a beat, and he let the lyrics lull him to sleep.

 _“Lonely is the night when you find yourself alone_  
_Your demons come to light and your mind is not your own_  
_Lonely is the night when there’s no one left to call_  
_You feel the time is right, say the writing’s on the wall”_


	6. Desperado

The lazy days were easier with the radio fixed. He was settling comfortably back into the brief periods of leisure in between his rides out farther into the desert, and he was getting deep into his rut again. Rest, feel a pull from that constant energy that kept drawing him out to the far reaches of the desert, explore, chart, photograph, stay until he was exhausted or his canteen was nearly empty, return to the shack to take half a day to rest before setting off again.

Rinse and repeat. At least his time was filled, even if not with much that could truly be considered productivity.

On a particular afternoon he was lounged upside down on his couch, legs draped over the headrest and his head on the floor, his hair spilling onto the ground around him. He had his knife in his hand, and was fidgeting with it, spinning it and letting it dangle from his fingertips and then flick the hilt back into his palm, just keeping his hands busy while he listened to the radio. There was some sort of contest going on today, where the deejay would play only two notes to a song and listeners would try to identify it. Keith was pretty good at it.

Two beats played from the radio now, the words  _“ – let me – ”_  audible over the instrument backing before the sound was cut off.

“Should I Stay Or Should I Go,” Keith said out loud to no one. “The Clash.”

He waited out the weather report, still idly twirling his knife and staring at the upside-down map on the wall opposite him, until the deejays returned and Bennie Jay spoke. “That was The Clash’s ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’” – yep, he’d gotten it right – “And congratulations to Lavonda Harrison for being the first caller to correctly guess it. Remember, listeners, you still have plenty of chances in the next two days to win a pass to next month’s Louder Than Life Rock Festival, so keep your ears open for another Two Note Challenge down the line. See how fast you can recognize your favorite classic hits. For now, here’s a full song for you, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with ‘Learning to Fly’.”

Keith didn’t so much as move as the song played, just listened as he rested with his head against the floor. He’d correctly guessed every challenge song they had played so far, since he listened to the station often enough that pretty much every note was irrevocably ingrained into his memory, but it was a solitary game for him. Even if he’d had a phone to call in from, the prizes were for a music festival all the way down in Yuma. He would have to be completely out of his mind to even consider making a trip like that by hoverbike.

“And for those of you making a drive through the city today, watch for traffic in the far northeast quarter by the Galaxy Garrison. The place is crowded as hell today anywhere within ten blocks of the Kerberos launch site, so find a detour if…”

Keith froze in place, dropping his knife to the floor with a clatter, not even noticing that it was no longer in his hand.

Kerberos. It had been ages since he’d heard anything about Kerberos. He’d almost managed to get the word out of his mind completely. Almost. It was always in the back of his mind somewhere ready to pounce if he let his thoughts drift for too long.

Slowly he righted himself on the couch, staring at the radio with wide eyes as the deejays chattered. “Ceremony will be starting in about an hour, and I’m guessing will finish up, maybe about an hour later? Eddie?”

“Yeah, like I would know how long commemoration ceremonies are supposed to take.”

“Ah, well, whichever the case, traffic should start clearing up later this afternoon. While we’re on the topic of Kerberos: Eddie, it’s been one year to the day since the launch for the Kerberos mission, yeah?”

“Good on you for noticin’ the passage of time.”

“And the Garrison’s officially closed the case for months.”

“Yeah?”

“And there’s been no word whatsoever about aliens or their abduction-related activities.”

“Your point?”

“You owe me ten dollars.”

Eddie snorted. “First of all, if there are aliens out there, they’re sneaky. Garrison won’t be able to find ‘em in less than a year. Second of all, even if we’re countin’ the case bein’ closed as an official declaration of alien non-existence, the deal was you give me ten bucks if I was right. I said nothin’ about me owin’ you if I was wrong.”

“What? Hey now, I’m pretty sure it was implied in the bet.”

“Dude, this is precisely why you flunked out of law school.”

Bennie laughed and gave some sort of reply, but Keith could no longer hear them, not over the sound of his own pulse, his own heartbeat. He had long since stopped attempting to keep track of the date in the desert, so he’d had no idea how much time had passed. One year. It had been one year since the launch of the Kerberos mission.

One year since he’d last saw Shiro.

And he’d spent the majority of that year wandering the desert in search of the meaning of cave pictures.

He stood from the couch to walk outside to his hoverbike, feeling all the while like he was in a daze, like his movements weren’t entirely his own. There was some sort of commemoration ceremony out at the launch site today, and he had time to make it.

He sped through the desert, barely taking in his surroundings as he drove, thoughts occupied only by Kerberos. The constant preparation for the mission that Shiro had been undergoing for practically as long as Keith had known him. The announcements in the school newsletter, and the coverage from outside media. The instructors who’d had him and his classmates tour the shuttle facility or test out some of the simulations of the Kerberos landscape that the Garrison had prepared for the crew to train with.

They day of the launch, the way Shiro had patted him on the back and smiled and told him to promise not to get into too much trouble until he was back on Earth to join in the fun and then had walked away. The shuttle roaring to life and taking to the sky surrounded by Garrison personnel and camera crews. The silent and half-empty dormitory he’d come back to afterward.

When he was close enough to the launch site to see the crowd gathered there, he slammed onto the brakes, sending a cloud of dust up behind him as he skidded to a halt. He knew he should go down and join the crowd, join the people, get close enough to be part of whatever a commemoration ceremomy entailed.

But he found he didn’t want to let go of his hoverbike. So he stayed at a distance, watching.

It was hard to see what exactly was happening on the makeshift stage next to the launchpad at this distance, and the people on it were at an angle with most of their backs to him. But he could recognize the uniforms of high-ranking Garrison officers easily.

He must have arrived just a little after the ceremony had started, since a straight-backed woman in full ceremonial military wear was at a microphone at the front of the stage right now. There were loudspeakers rigged up around the stage, so Keith could hear the words. She was giving the crowd a brief history of the Kerberos mission, how the plans for it had come about, the goals for the mission, the process of selecting a crew for the voyage, all that had been done to plan and train and prepare and ensure that the mission was a success.

She then lamented how even the best laid plans cannot account for every possibility, every problem that could be encountered, and that the tragic failure of Kerberos had been proof of it.

The woman left the microphone so another officer could take her place, this one launching into anecdotes about working side-by-side with the brilliant Sam Holt, what an intelligent innovator he had been, how he was beloved by his colleagues in his field, what a devastating loss he had been. The next couple of people to come to the microphone said more of the same; this must have been some sort of testimonial portion of the event. A handful of officers talked about the crew’s programmer next, and then began the short speeches about Shiro.

It was hard to listen. His stomach felt like it was full of concrete as people spoke, the Garrison’s flight instructor who had helped Shiro on the path to becoming the best pilot the Garrison had ever seen, the commanding officers who described watching him grow as a student and how he’d been a young man with absolutely unlimited potential, two officers who had been his engineer and communications officer as cadets and who talked about how Shiro had influenced where they were on their career path today.

After every speech, the crowd would clap politely, keeping the applause subdued to select the solemnity of the occasion. And after every speech, Keith’s grip on the handlebars would tighten, the fabric of his gloves pressing into his palm and his knuckles growing increasingly white.

The officers were seated in a line across the back of the stage, and the seating was the order in which they went to the front of the stage to give their speeches. Keith didn’t know how long it took for the officer on the far end to stand and take his place at the microphone. It had to have been hours and hours, or maybe just a few minutes. Even as he listened, they were being muddled in his head so that the details escaped him.

He didn’t know who the last officer to speak was, but he was so highly decorated that Keith could see the sun reflecting off his medals even from here, so he had to have been someone of importance. The officer didn’t introduce himself as he stepped up to the microphone. Instead, he launched right into his speech, his voice booming and clear and demanding the full attention of every figure in the crowd.

“One year ago today, three brave and unforgettable men left this planet to make the longest journey that any human beings have ever made before. They set off in pursuit of understanding, in pursuit of the truth about what lay in the far reaches of our solar system.

“And they were meant to return to us, to share with the world what they had seen, what they had discovered, what they had learned. It is with a heavy heart that we acknowledge now that what we had thought they were meant to do was not what fate planned.”

The man paused, letting silence reign for a few seconds, maybe to collect his thoughts or composure, maybe for dramatic effect. Then he continued. “Since the beginning of humankind, we have not been content to stay put. We were built to explore, to learn. It is a fundamental part of who we are as a species: the desire constantly search for something bigger. To constantly expand our knowledge of the workings of workings of the universe.

“We have done this by venturing into the unknown. We have traveled to unexplored corners of the globe, and later, but so recently on a cosmic scale, to those beyond it. We have progressed in all areas of industry and technology by building and creating, bringing to life innovations that we often thought impossible. We have learned about the worlds of medicine and biology and chemistry by observing phenomena we didn’t yet understand, and we experimented and furthered our studies to expand our knowledge of these fields and how we could use them for the betterment of ourselves and others. We looked into the unknown, and we took it upon ourselves to know it.

“In the unknown, however, there is always a risk. And we cannot ever hope to continue in humanity’s journey if we do not take these risks.

“Samuel Holt, Matthew Holt, and Takashi Shirogane knew of the risks. There is so much we’ve still yet to learn about what lies at the edges of our solar system and what lies beyond, and we cannot know what dangers may be out there along the way. We cannot know until we search, until we find out for ourselves.

“The failure of the Kerberos mission was a tragedy. Three great minds were lost on the journey, and three great hearts along with them. But it was not a tragedy that came about in vain. The crew of this mission created a benchmark for humanity, seeing farther into the unknown than anyone before them. They left to seek knowledge and understanding of the universe, and the fact that fate did not allow them the chance to bring it back does not mean that they couldn’t have found it before fate’s intervention.

“I like to believe they did. These three men left to the edge of our solar system ready to expand the horizons of Earth’s quest to bring to light and make sense of all that we previously could only wonder about. There is much yet to be discovered, infinite possibilities, ways we can take what we find in the far reaches of the galaxy and apply them to making massive strides in science, strides that would forever impact life for all on Earth.

“The crew of the Garrison’s Kerberos mission has been and will continue to be dearly missed. We expect to see the names Samuel Holt, Matthew Holt, and Takashi forever in our memory, and in our history for a long time to come. And though we honor them in ceremony today, through speeches and plaques and commiseration, we must also honor them by continuing what they have started.

“We will continue to explore. We will continue to learn. And we will continue to not let fear or doubt stop us from continuing to reach out to these new horizons. We will accept the possibility of failure and of loss, and we will strive bravely forward in our unending search for truth and understanding.

“And as we do, we will do it in remembrance, in honor, of the Kerberos crew, and of their monumental steps in their journey to the unknown.”

There was applause as the speaker returned to his seat, but Keith could barely hear it. It was a soft and insubstantial buzz in his ear, in his head. The crowd was blurring together in his vision, becoming a single shapeless mass.

It was too much. This whole thing was too much, and not just in terms of how bloated and overwrought that speech had been. In terms of everything.

He didn’t remember starting up his hoverbike. He didn’t remember turning away from the launch site and heading back into the desert.

He must have done it, though, because there he was flying across the vast and deserted landscape of rocks and dirts, on his way back to his shack.

When he pulled up next to the shack, he nearly collapsed right off of his hoverbike. He was unsteady as he walked, and he didn’t go into the shack, instead opting to sit on the porch steps leading to the door, not quite listening to the chorus of “Bad Moon Rising” floating outside through the open window.

He breathed deeply, if quickly. He shouldn’t have gone to the launch site. He did not need to hear these people in Shiro’s life talk about him, because they were all things he already knew. He didn’t need to be reminded of what had happened that day, and what purpose it was supposed to serve.

And he sure as hell did not need some guy who didn’t even know Shiro wax poetic about him, claim to know what he had thought and what he wanted, trying to make Shiro a symbol of some vague quest for understanding that the Garrison was probably only going to use in order to get a positive response whenever they decided to announce their next manned mission to the edge of the solar system because of course they were going to. If at first you don’t succeed…

His arm was shaking as he brought it up to wipe his nose as he sniffed, and shook harder and he lifted the other one as well to grind the heels of his hands into his stinging eyes.

Part of him wanted to go inside, get some rest. But he didn’t want to be in the shack right now. It was too small, too dark. He didn’t want to go in there and feel like the walls were closing in on him, the walls that were covered floor to ceiling in all the nothing he had accomplished since he started living there.

Because that’s what it was, wasn’t it. He had been out in the desert for nearly a year and he had dedicated his life to doodles and gut feelings. Shiro had always been on him about how much potential he had, about how he was on the path to accomplish great things and how he shouldn’t doubt himself and how he needed to chase his goals.

Shiro had thought that Keith was going to turn out great. Great like him.

That sure as hell hadn’t gone according to plan.

Internally he cursed himself for how he had spent these months after getting booted from the Garrison. He’d wasted them. For all that stupid speaker had been all pomp and prose, he did have a point about how much Shiro had loved learning and discovering and testing new waters.

Keith had thought he was doing that at first, when he’d followed those tracks and found those etchings and let that bizarre energy lead him around the desert like a dog on leash. Now, though… now it was looking more and more like a dead end.

Maybe he should quit, he thought. Give up on this goddamned desert. Shiro had always drilled into his mind platitudes about never giving up, but there had to be exceptions.

Then again, this all he had. If he gave up now, there would be nothing left.

He was stuck out here. And he was stuck out here on his own.

When he’d been kicked out of the Garrison, he had felt lost. Now the feeling was starting to crawl its way back.

A piano theme played from the radio through the open window as Keith brought his knees up to his chest, crossed his arms over them, and finally buried his head in them. He could hear tiny creaking sounds from the porch as it shook along with him, and The Eagles accompanied him as he curled further into himself:

 _“Desperado, oh, you ain’t gettin’ no younger_  
_Your pain and your hunger, they’re drivin’ you home_  
_And freedom, oh freedom, well that’s just some people talkin’_  
_Your prison is walking through this world all alone”_


	7. Fly By Night

The energy had been different over the last few days. Keith had had a fitful sleep the night after the commemoration ceremony, and initially he had blamed stress. But by the morning when he’d fully woken up, he had managed to identify it. It was the energy that he’d been chasing all this time, but it was… off. Not exactly stronger, but more intense. Focused. Like there was some insubstantial force trying to tell him something. And like it was urging him, like it  _wanted_  him to chase it.

He couldn’t bring himself to follow it, though. He was feeling numb to the energy. Numb to everything, really. He hadn’t gone through with his thoughts of giving up on his search and trying to find somewhere else to go or something else to do. Not because he wanted to stay, but because he just couldn’t bring himself to leave.

But that didn’t mean he wanted to go soaring off into the desert again. Not yet. He stayed in the shack, passing the time mostly by drawing or listening to the radio, all while avoiding looking at the collection maps and charts and blue lions on his wall. He’d picked up a couple of ancient dime novels last time he’d been to town, since the library had set up a used book sale outside in front of their building and Keith figured it couldn’t hurt any to buy a couple. For a good cause and all. But he gave up trying to read them when he kept zoning out on the first few pages.

His mind didn’t want to be preoccupied with stories, it seemed. No room for that when that stupid energy was taking up all of the available space in his brain.

The energy tugged at him, told him to stop distracting himself and get back out there. He ignored it.

It was at its strongest ever on the night he lay on the couch, flat on his back, looking up at the sky and waiting for fatigue to overtake him so he could go to sleep, tapping his finger against the couch to the slow rhythm of “Nights in White Satin” as it played. The deejays took over as usual as it faded out.

“That was The Moody Blues kicking off our Prog Rock Night. Every progressive rock hit in the known universe, coming at you from sundown to sunup.”

“Every single one.

“Eddie, for those listeners who aren’t familiar with rock and roll terminology, can you explain: what is progressive rock?”

“Hell if I know.”

“That’s as good a description as any. We’re moving now to the quintessential prog rock hit, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody followed by Led Zepellin and Pink Floyd with their stairways and bricks, all with no commercials, no interruptions.”

“So, the big ones.”

“Prog rock clichés, yep.”

“Reel ‘em in with the hits they know, save the weird stuff for the insomnia crowd.”

“And they’ll love it. Enjoy the next thirty minutes of non-stop music.”

He stayed up and listened to all thirty of those minutes, and then another half-hour block. They switched out to the late-night deejay, and kept going, and Keith kept listening.

He couldn’t sleep.

He was exhausted, so why the hell couldn’t he sleep?

The energy, he realized. That stupid, stupid energy. It was in his gut like a stomachache, in his head like a migraine, and for some reason, it had decided that it wanted to give Keith a nice little bout of insomnia. Fantastic.

The songs past by in a slow blur, Keith barely listening. In the middle of “Carry On Wayward Son” he rolled over on the couch and got up to find something to do, something non-stimulating enough that it might help relax him.

He picked going out to sit on the porch and stargaze. For all the time he’d spent out here under the open desert skies, he hadn’t done much stargazing in the past not-quite-a-year. He hadn’t thought to, been preoccupied with thoughts of, well, pretty much everything.

He liked it, though. It was peaceful, the wide clear sky was pretty. And when he had stargazed with his dad as a kid, he would always grow sleepy, nod off immediately after they went inside or sometimes even while they were still outside, so his dad would carry him to bed. He did that a lot.

His dad had taught him all the constellations in the sky, but that had been such a long time ago, and he didn’t know how much of it had stuck with him - the Garrison brushed on them a bit during his first year, but never quizzed the students or had them commit them to memory, as they preferred to focus on individual star names, not constellations; more precision that way. He tested himself, finding the Big Dipper and by extension Ursa Major first, get the easy one out of the way. Above Ursa Major was the long tail of Draco, curling around Ursa Minor. He couldn’t remember the name of the one next to Ursa Minor, and he knew that was going to drive him nuts. It began with a C, he was pretty sure. Not Cygnus, that was the one closer to Draco’s head. Not Cassiopeia, that was the next one over…

He frowned. Cassiopeia was another one of those constellations that was easy to spot. Five stars in a zigzag, like sort of a giant W in the sky. Keith would recognize it anywhere. And he certainly knew it well enough to know that there was not supposed to be a sixth star in it, situated right smack in between Caph and Schedar, just as bright as the others if not moreso.

Curious, he stood up to go back into the shack and sift through the stack of dad’s old equipment that was in good enough condition to have kept. Buried at the bottom of one box was a telescope, a fairly heavy and strong one. There probably was, or had once been, a stand that was supposed to go with it, since the telescope had a mount, but Keith didn’t know where that might be. Didn’t matter really, he could use it like a spyglass instead.

He hastened back outside and lifted the telescope, trying to hold it steady enough to get it aimed at the mysterious sixth star and get the image into focus. It was clearer now, but he still couldn’t make out much. Except for the fact that, as he noticed after half a minute of staring, the light from the star seemed to be moving farther out toward the edges of his field of view.

It was getting bigger. No, not bigger,  _closer._

He felt a surge inside him then, one that took him by surprise enough that he nearly dropped the telescope. That energy, the one that had been so aggressively nagging at him all day, but for a couple of seconds it had hit him with all it had, pounding into his head with such force that he could almost physically feel it. There was a vibration against his mind. A sort of rapid rumble. Like an old engine revving.

Or like a cat purring.

He looked back up to the not-star. Whatever it was, the energy had reacted awfully strongly to him noticing it. And the light was growing closer still.

The energy wanted him to see it. It wanted him to find it, just as strongly as it had wanted him to find those markings in those caves.

It was giving him something new. After so many months of repitition and dead ends, it had decided it wanted Keith to chase something else.

And he didn’t know why he wanted to oblige it. But he did.

He ran back into the shack to grab his jacket, sifting through his supplies for anything he might need on his task. But he couldn’t think, couldn’t focus. Not with that energy in his head telling him he had to leave, he had to go, he had to leave  _now_.

So he decided to forgo supplies, save grabbing his knife to sheath in his belt loop and, on a whim, snatched up some of his stock of ANFO as well. You just never knew when something might need to be blown up.

The sounds of Prog Rock Night continued to echo throughout the shack, Rush accompanying him as he readied to go.

_Fly by night away from here  
Change my life again  
Fly by night, goodbye my dear  
My ship isn’t coming and I just can’t pretend_

_My ship isn’t coming and I just can’t pretend_

And before he left – before he hopped onto his bike to go rocketing off into the desert and chasing down whatever it was that was approaching from the sky, whatever new revelation it would bring him – he turned the radio off.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](https://justheretobreakthings.tumblr.com)!


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